If we celebrate publicly the things threaten us privately it breaks its hold on our life.
I heard a guy talk about this in America. He pastors a huge church and well actually, I don't mind telling you his name. You guys have heard of Andy Stanley, Charles Stanley's son? [Yes.] He pastors a huge church. Have you guys heard of Louie Giglio? [Yeah.] See, you guys have more heard of Louie Giglio than Andy Stanley. Now Andy Stanley was talking about this once and he talked about how he had to get a point where he dealt with something. Louie Giglio and Andy Stanley were friends from childhood. They are the two that got together and started North Point which is now running well over 40,000 people okay, so on many different campuses. So they got together and did this. Well in that Andy was the senior pastor and he was the speaker; Louie would share the pulpit with him. But what started to happen was Louie Giglio started a singles ministry on Tuesday night called 722, so this was on Tuesday night and it was for singles only, so you're really sort of limiting your base.
Tuesday nights, singles only, he was drawing 4,000 people, okay, 4,000 people which Andy was fine with. Well one night all he heard was how it was so packed it was standing room only, it was this, that and the other. Well one night he had to cover for Louie and so they announced hey, this Tuesday Andy Stanley's going to be at 722, so Andy gets there and when he gets up to speak - this is after the music was over and everything, so everybody had time to get there. When he got up to speak he said there was huge gaps in the auditorium. There was way less people there than were normally there, and he said something got in him about Louie Giglio's success. Something got in him and he knew that if he didn't deal with it he could lose his friend and it would damage his organisation, so here's how he dealt with it. On a weekend service he gave Louie the pulpit and he got up and publicly celebrated the success of Louie Giglio. He said as he was doing it it broke the hold of jealousy on his life. The cure for jealousy is to publicly celebrate things that privately threaten you, to publicly celebrate things that privately threaten you. Celebration will break the power of jealousy over your life.
So my question to you is this, is who - and it will be different for everybody - who threatens you privately? In your private thoughts who in this organisation right now threatens you privately? And I want you to make a plan to celebrate them publicly, celebrate them publicly. Even if it's in the form of an email, even if it's the form of a letter, even if it's the form of just talking him up, talking her up, whatever it is. I want you to go out of your way. This is not about right and wrong; this is about breaking the power of something over your life. Listen to me, this is my conclusion here, listen to me. Four things that are true of you as a leader: number one, you want, in your heart you want to follow someone who is willing to acknowledge that he or she has failures. You want to follow someone who will acknowledge their failures. You also want to follow someone who won't hold your failures against you, so you want to follow someone who will acknowledge their failures; you want to follow someone who won't hold your failures against you. You want to follow someone who will share the credits and rewards of success with everybody, and you want to follow someone who will publicly celebrate your victories.
Let me restate that. You want to follow someone who will acknowledge their failures. You want to follow someone who will let you fail and won't hold that against you. You want to follow someone who's willing to share the success of it with you, and you want to follow someone who will celebrate your victories in public. Now if that's true about you wanting that, then wouldn't it stand to reason that other people want that as well? So if you want a leader like that the best thing for you to do is to become a leader like that: one who acknowledges their failures, who lets other people fail, who's willing to share the reward for success, and who celebrates people's victories publicly. When you share people's victories publicly and handle their failures privately they will die for you. When you handle - listen. When you handle their victories publicly and you handle their failures privately, those people will be loyal to you to the grave and that will create a healthy organisation, because it gets greed and guilt and anger and jealousy out of the question, and never ever, ever tolerates a breakdown of ahad.